1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method of providing large vocabulary speech processing and more specifically to providing speech processing such as automatic speech recognition based on fixed-point arithmetic.
2. Introduction
Large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition (LVCSR) finds wide use in consumer, military and industrial applications using embedded platforms, such as PDA's, telephone handsets, network appliances, and wearable computers. Often a speech recognition module is part of an overall spoken dialog system that includes various modules to receive speech from a user, recognize the speech (via a speech recognition module), understand the meaning of the speech or the intent of the user (via a spoken language understanding module), formulate responsive text (via a dialog management module) and generate responsive speech (via a text-to-speech module). These and variations of these modules are known in the art for carrying out a natural language spoken dialog with a person. Some systems may not utilize all of these modules but only utilize one or two, such as just providing speech recognition to convert speech to text.
An example application is in Short Message Service (SMS) that has an expected global volume in excess of 1,000 billion messages in 2005. LVCSR on embedded platforms presents a unique set of challenges. In particular, to lower hardware cost and power consumption, for longer battery life and miniaturization, the CPU's on small portable devices do not have floating-point arithmetic units. However their computational power is constantly increasing, which motivates the study of methods of enabling speech recognition on smaller devices. Traditionally, larger computers and servers have hardware floating point units either in the CPU or in separate floating point processor chips. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improvement that enables highly compute intensive algorithms such as those utilized in speech processing to be able to function on smaller devices, such as portable computing devices, that do not have the computing power or size to perform floating point operations.